President Obama Has a Dangerous Job
A French philosopher and acquaintance, Manuel de Dieguez, blogged not long ago that a “sacrifice” of Barack Obama was conceivable: an assassin’s bullet might be the outcome of the nuclear terror in the Middle East, fears in Gaza, stupidity in Jerusalem, and blindness in America. I recall having heard of Jesse Jackson murmuring the same thought, in a moment of splendiferous applause for Barack Obama, that he would be killed. Jesse is certainly an authority on “the black experience”. The case of the Reverend Martin Luther King is a stabbing memory.
Explanations of assassinations are various. We recall that Mohandas K. Gandhi, a divine hero for hundreds of millions of mankind, was killed on January 30, 1948 (a critical period in Palestine-Israel, too) by Nathuram Godse, who feared that Gandhi’s attempts to bring peace between Hindus and Muslims betrayed the Hindu cause. There are a great many Palestinians and Israelis who despise reconciliation. Some would want to kill a leader who urged a single state of Jews and Arabs. Yet they would also like to kill any leader who sincerely desired the two-state solution.
On November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin of Israel, after a celebration of the Oslo Accords that had brought him a Nobel Peace Prize, was murdered by a young rightist religious fanatic, Yigal Amir, who could not stand the idea of Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements being turned back to the Palestinians. Leaders who espouse the cause of a Holy Land divided in twain, both Israelis and American, and most other national leaders, are let to do so only because they are obviously not succeeding; and maybe they do not intend to be successful, but merely to drag the suffering situation on and on, or bring on a decisive Middle East War that would cripple hopelessly the Muslim nations, and permit Israel to expulse the Palestinians completely from the territories it covets.
forty-three American Presidents before Barack Obama, eight died in office. Of these, four were assassinated and the other four died of illness. Ronald Reagan was wounded by a solitary assassin who was madly jealous of an actress. President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt narrowly escaped death from the gun of a crazed anarchist, whose bullet, intended for Roosevelt, struck Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago. As he lay dying, Cermak spoke nobly, “I’m glad it was me instead of you.” But we cannot spare good mayors either.
Abraham Lincoln was shot dead by a prominent theatrical actor of Slave-State Confederate sympathies, John Wilkes Booth. President James A Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by a lone maniac who was unable to get appointed to an office. William McKinley was killed by a lone working man in 1901, who was inspired by a speech of, and brief talk with, the famous anarchist, Emma Goldman. Theodore Roosevelt was slightly wounded by a distraught woman during the 1912 Presidential campaign. The motives and machinery of these murders and attempts appear to be clear enough. I might add that there were some suspicions voiced that Warren Harding did not die from a sudden pneumonia, but was poisoned by his wife or other persons.
When it came down to the killing of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, doubts entered the picture. There seemed to be no question but that Lee Harvey Oswald was of a disabled state of mind, that he was proficient in rifle marksmanship, and positioned in the proper place – well, almost perfect – to fire his weapon as the President’s open car passed below on parade in Dallas. His understandable motive seemed to be political – pro-communist, pro-Castro. True, too, his life was a failure and his life history sufficiently erratic to demonstrate madness. He was nutty enough to turn against Castro, if murderous Cuban exiles would have spoken to him persuasively. No other suspect appeared at the time. The special Presidential commission under Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren published a report in this vein. It proposed a lone killer.
The Report was a thick volume and supplemented by some seventy volumes of proceedings and records, almost all held in secret archives for some years. Nonetheless at least three alternative theories have been put forward. Doubt was cast on the ability of the deadly shot striking the President while his limousine was in motion, coming from the awkward window post high atop a building, without top quality weaponry and a well-practiced marksman, while an alternative point of firing from a neighboring knoll was suggested. Or perhaps shots from both points. Oswald was murdered day after next, by an all-around crook named Jack “Rubenstein” Ruby, before he might be seriously examined and questioned. Ruby was tried for murder and sentenced to death, but he died abruptly two years later of a sudden and atrocious triple cancer just as his appeal for a new trial had been granted. Suspicions of a poisoning were voiced in due course, but not investigated. Multiple cancers, which are rare, are known to occur as a consequence of radiation poisoning. Although he seems to have talked vaguely of a conspiracy, he argued that he felt sorry for Jack and his wife, Jacqueline (Jackie), and was doing the country and the courts a favor by getting rid of Oswald..
It developed, long after the case was closed, the report filed, Ruby imprisoned, and the ugly war in Vietnam resumed, under the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, that Ruby and Oswald had known one another off and on for years, that they had been in and out of the gun smuggling business with Fidel Castro. President Kennedy himself had encouraged the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro, but several attempts failed. The mafia of Las Vegas and elsewhere held profitable gambling interests under the Battista regime that had been lost: the casinos went broke. (I remember dropping a few dollars to contemptuous croupiers of a quite empty house, not long after the Castro Revolution.)
Other details assumed significance, so it seemed. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hated Kennedy, who was also hated by typical badly educated, anti-Catholic Southerners. Kennedy had been elected probably only because given the support of two of the most corrupt vote-traffikers in the USA – the Cook County Illinois Democratic machine and the Rio Grande region Democratic organization that sent Johnson to the Senate and later on bolstered with his heavy Vice-Presidential vote the vote of Kennedy. They enabled Kennedy to win a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Kennedy’s national popular majority was but a few thousands.
L.B. Johnson was one of the most unscrupulous politicians of the age. He was unlike Kennedy, who had learned of the Israeli government’s secret construction of an atomic bomb, and told Ben-Gurion to cease and desist, extracting finally a promise that American inspectors would be let in on occasion. These were to make sure that the mighty work going on (with the help of the French) at Dimona in Israel was solely for the peaceful use of atomic power. Ben-Gurion had resigned. (Was he, with foreboding and foreknowledge, jumping ship?) Kennedy wrote Ben-Gurion’s successor about how important it was to the USA and the world that the Dimona project be restricted to peaceful purposes. But Johnson was pro-Israel in this matter and all others – his cover-up of the sinking of the USS Liberty being one example, insofar as Israel was concerned.
Since then, books have been written about these cases. The theory was raised that Kennedy had been disposed of by a combination of the Israeli secret service, the American CIA and FBI, and that Kennedy’s hard stand against the Soviet Union vis-a-vis Cuba would have been enough to persuade Oswald, a confused admirer of the dissolute criminal Ruby, to undertake the “hit.” The Jewish connections were several, aside from Ruby: the leader of the Jewish mafia and largest operator in Las Vegas, was Meyer Lansky, who worked with Israeli intelligence and politicians, and fled to Israel when in danger of arrest for crimes committed in American jurisdiction. Credibility is added to this scenario when conjecturing why Jack Ruby could calmly and coldly walk into the police station in Dallas, past the friendly police whom he had joined in corrupting law enforcement for many years, and shoot down his friend. Oswald looked surprised as he fell; his pal Ruby was gunning him down.
The police were no friends of Kennedy. His numerous bodyguards were hardly efficient and devoted. Given Ben-Gurion, the Great Old Man’s failure to keep Kennedy from blocking the Bomb, and the huge intense desire of Israel’s leadership to stave off a threatening world by building a bomb, and the knowledge that Vice-President Johnson was standing by to take over, there just might be the possibility of connivance among several elements here.
I am no expert on the life and death of Jack Kennedy. I am acutely aware though of some of the problems of the people of Israel. The basic affection of Jews for Kennedy may have been diminishing both in America and in Israel. Similarly, after a heavy initial support, confirmed by an astonishing accrual of Jews in top and middle offices of the Obama administration, Obama’s support diminished, significantly, in a matter of months, both in Israel and the USA, as indicated by various public opinion polls and by incidents. The extremely pro-Israel neo-conservatives began to glide back onto the political scene in America, and in Israel highly aggressive rightists grew in power. The media and public relations became negative and critical. There were stubborn moves to keep up and even expand the settlements that had already placed a quarter of a million aggressive and illegal Jews into Palestinian Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank.
The USA pledged itself to joining the World Council on Human Rights, a group that it had hitherto shunned because of its continual disapproval of the behavior of the government of Israel. The largest number by far of its condemnatory resolutions had been directed against Israel. Organized Zionists and the Israeli government were alarmed and angered by this American action.
Every incident was reason for what President Obama in one instance called “overreaction”, this in a case where a white policeman arrested a protesting black Professor of Harvard University as the latter was entering his own home in a white and prejudiced neighborhood. YouTube films on the Web were liable to be censored if they displayed the derogatory conduct of Israelis toward America. When a San Francisco foundation set up a film festival that included a movie depicting the heinous rundown by an Israeli bulldozer of an American pacifist and aid-worker, Rachel Corrie, a flood of attacks against the festival managers occurred that let the film and the First Amendment be permitted on stage only after damage was done to human relations, locally and especially among Jews themselves.
A crude, disgusting cartoon in the New York Post, whose readers and advertisers numbered a great many lower-class and lower-middle-class Jews, appeared in February of 2009. A pet chimpanzee had gravely bitten a lady in Stamford, Connecticut, and had been killed by the police. The cartoon appears here below:
Abroad and in America, polls and police records were showing increases in anti-semitic feelings and behavior. These numerous indicators and causes of anti-Israelism and anti-semitism, as interpreted by the principles of social psychology, convey real dangers to the mass of Jews and gentiles and to the leaders who must represent them in conduct and speech. Breast-beating and aggression go together, whether in the Bible or on the street.
We must remember, too, that we are dealing with the most sensitive and powerful element of the American population and the whole related population of a mirror brother-country. Times without number, it is publicized that the Jewish Israeli record of suffering and unjust treatment goes back over two thousand years. People are told that their religion is owed to the Jews, and in return the Jews have received nothing but scorn and invidious discrimination. This sacral history, much of it, both Jewish and Christian, false and mythological, implants guilt on all sides.
To its effects have been added the unending sacralization of the Holocaust, such that all over the western world, it has become more blasphemous and punitive to derogate and diminish the Holocaust than to go about preaching atheism and free love – formerly the most heinous crimes. And, certainly, we must support this view. For the good of all peoples, mixed and unmixed – Jews, Muslims, Christians, and humanists – the Holocaust or Shoah, like every traumatic historical event, needs to be studied in its full gravity, as a factual record of man’s all too frequently nefarious nature.
Also we are treating with a huge highly diverse and erratic population and set of governments, the USA, which can readily turn angry and disorderly. Jews – we speak, of course, in generalities – produce more than their share of genius and charity but also possess a somewhat higher level of neurotic and aggressive impulses. The Israelis are particularly vulnerable and are unfortunately egged on by American Jews who are, it would seem, readier to dive into a cauldron of conflicts, a world conflict, on behalf of Israel – especially if this conflict is to be played out at a safe distance from their home country.
American patriots need therefore to tread firmly, with measured pace, the dangerous path of the nation’s policies. One needs to worry over the welfare of the President as a representative of the welfare of the nation as a whole. We need to care for him as the champion of a winning team, and ask the Canaans, who should soon be among us, to do the same.
The message was obviously that the President’s huge Economic Stimulus Program, which had been voted the day before the cartoon appeared, opposed by many Republicans and Obama-haters, would now be dead along with its sponsor, the black ape, President Obama. An uproar of protest occurred among blacks and some others, to no avail. Insinuations could be drawn that the black monkey author of the bill was deservedly to be killed.
Who knows from what maniacs might draw inspiration? Several serious investigations of threats and plans to kill the President out of racial prejudice had been necessitated after Obama became a national figure. In the summer of 2009, a veritable cyclone of improper protests enveloped the spokespersons for Obama’s proposed reform of the medical care conditions of Americans, making public debate and discussion unintelligible. Too, a rash of meetings, writings, and demands bespotted the nation, over the charge, hardly credible and anyway of no public benefit, that the President had been born in Kenya and therefore was constitutionally banned from running for the office.
Jews felt increasingly ashamed, from these and other happenings. Over 90% of the gulled holders of investments entrusted to the Bernard Madoff hedge funds, amounting to perhaps 65 billion dollars, were Jewish institutions and individuals. The dismal fall-out harmed Jewish self-image and morale. Other similar events occurred. For instance in July 2009, the FBI swept the State of New Jersey (our model for Canaan!) rounding up 44 persons, including rabbis, police and prosecutors accused them of money-laundering via Israel, and sundry other crimes involving tax evasion, importation of human organs and human eggs.
A massive Kosher meat processor in the Iowa town of Postville was raided by immigration authorities, who found some 400 illegal immigrants at work there, and a trail of labor law, product sanitation, financial and tax offenses, which altogether put the company into bankruptcy and reduced the town’s fiscal and social viability by half. A team of a dozen rabbis rushed to the scene; their report whitewashed the operation in all regards. As will happen with Jews, other stepped forward to set the record straight. The Jerusalem Post on May 26, 2008 headlined the story “Jewish groups Upset by AgriProcessor Scandal.” |
